Melamed, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, has drawn on her professional background to depict the interior lives of girls and women caught in such a brutal, cloistered world. She offers strong and at times poetic images of the natural environment in which her story takes place — terrain that sounds a lot like the islands in Puget Sound. She is less successful at conjuring the man-made surroundings (homes and church) or, more importantly, the process by which the force field of maternal love, as instinctive as the male sex drive, has been stomped out. Such powerful emotions don’t evaporate overnight.
Gather the Daughters is set in the alternative reality of a misogynist dystopia ... Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has had many imitators, and nothing about Jennie Melamed’s setting is particularly inventive, but characterisation is strong and the focus on the leadership and strategic skills of pubescent girls is refreshing ... Narrative tension builds as skillful characterisation fills the reader with growing concern for the central voices ... This is not an unusual novel, but it is a strong example of its kind. And an account of what happens to the rising generation when islanders decide to cut themselves off from the neighbouring mainland to pursue a fantasy of conservatism.
Gather the Daughters, Jennie Melamed’s debut novel, presents a world in which child abuse has been normalized, even sanctified, and in which the salutary pleasures available to girls and women are few and far between — a world in which girls make a harrowingly quick journey from childhood to motherhood to death ...shares a genetic code with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It imagines a world in which reproduction is heavily controlled, and where women and girls must submit — totally — to male authority ... These sons end up as ghostly narrative curiosities in Melamed’s novel, bearing no resemblance to the cruel men who lord over the island’s women.
Daughters is derivative at best and a faded photocopy at worst ... Melamed's plot suggests some real storytelling chops. Crafting a new society with its own bizarre rules is a big undertaking and the writing is fast-paced. You get a feel for what the girls face and how they strain against the island dogma to find their own voices and freedom. Whether they succeed, Melamed never tells us. Gather the Daughters works as a light — yet dark — beach read, but you might find yourself looking for a tongue-less ferryman (don’t ask) to take you from the sand back to the real world.
…[a] quietly horrifying debut … Melamed’s gorgeous writing lets the details of this fundamentalist society drip out slowly. Readers will find dread washing over them as the story unfolds, and will be left catching their breath when the full backstory dawns on them. This one belongs on every dystopia reading list.”
...[a] compulsive and suspenseful debut ... This beautifully and carefully constructed work pulls no punches in its depiction of a bleak future; it will attract fans of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and readers who enjoy horror, suspense, and dystopian fiction.
...a dystopian novel that remixes several pre-existing gimmicks into one … Melamed, a nurse practitioner whose bio identifies her chosen field as ‘working with traumatized children,’ is using her dystopia to speak out on behalf of abused girls, and she does it masterfully. The protagonists of Daughters are all young women and girls. They’re subject to the whims of the men in power … Daughters is worth reading for the perspective that Melamed delivers to the genre. I’ve never before read a dystopian fiction that was an extended analogy for an abusive relationship, and the analogy works quite well.
...a terrifying work of speculative fiction ... While it may be difficult at first to differentiate among her many characters, by the end they each become clear. This is a haunting work in the spirit of The Handmaid’s Tale—but Melamed more than holds her own. Hopefully her debut is a harbinger of more to come. Fearsome, vivid, and raw: Melamed’s work describes a world of indoctrination and revolt.
Melamed’s haunting and powerful debut blazes a fresh path in the tradition of classic dystopian works ... It’s a chilling tale of an insular culture grounded in 'the art of closing off the world to those who seek it.' Melamed’s prose is taut and precise. Her nuanced characters and honest examination of the crueler sides of human nature establish her as a formidable author in the vein of Shirley Jackson and Margaret Atwood.
